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You must admit Wine is heavily reliant on good latency, so if your hardware is a setback then running any API's closer to the kernel or hardware, is the better.

Personally I've noticed Wine improvements with sound only with recent releases, older versions were shocking. Maybe this is due to OpenAL.

I'm the first to admit that I'm not a sound guru, but I know that my hardware hasn't changed. Whatever Canonical pushed onto my machine in the form of PulseAudio just doesn't play nice with everything. Until I did this update, almost everything worked without resorting to CLI-fu. Now I'm constantly having to reset PA when I run a WINE application. Worse yet, native Linux games that PulseAudio should cope with flawlessly (and ALSA did), now have to be made to fall back on OSS manually.

But don't get me wrong - PulseAudio has all kinds of promise. Let's just refrain from trotting it out as a perfect solution and a cure for cancer.

ASIDE: (I seem to be running PulseAudio 1.1 if it matters. Not sure why it wasn't upgraded to a more recent version during the update.)

I'm the first to admit that I'm not a sound guru, but I know that my hardware hasn't changed. Whatever Canonical pushed onto my machine in the form of PulseAudio just doesn't play nice with everything. Until I did this update, almost everything worked without resorting to CLI-fu. Now I'm constantly having to reset PA when I run a WINE application. Worse yet, native Linux games that PulseAudio should cope with flawlessly (and ALSA did), now have to be made to fall back on OSS manually.

But don't get me wrong - PulseAudio has all kinds of promise. Let's just refrain from trotting it out as a perfect solution and a cure for cancer.

ASIDE: (I seem to be running PulseAudio 1.1 if it matters. Not sure why it wasn't upgraded to a more recent version during the update.)

I say that your problem has more to do with Ubuntu and less to do with Pulseaudio.

Ubuntu has done stupid things that broke or at least made pulseaudio terrible in the past. I wouldn't be surprised if they did it again.

Are you kidding me?! It is still a horrible mess! I've just tried it 3 month ago.

Pulseaudio is in many parts duplicating work that is already present in ALSA and doing it worse.

Pulseaudio should focus on being just an audio server with per application sound levels and network transparency. Also it shouldn't try try manage "every" sound output. Programs that don't directly support it shouldn't be touched by it, that is what creates this mess in the first place.

While at the same time ALSA should make its advanced settings more easily available. Normalizing, noise cancellation, surround sound, all this is already possible with ALSA it is only hard to write into your .asoundrc we actually need a program that is able to create this file automatically depending on the users preferences.

I would actually love to have a good sound-server on my Linux boxes, but every time I try Pulseaudio it only creates a mess.

I'm not arguing a point, but keep in mind that other people's experience (E.g. me) is *radically* different that yours and in many cases, issues can be solved or triggered by the distribution itself.
Case of point: my workstation has 3 sound devices:
1. Audigy 2SZ connected to 5.1 setup.
2. On-boad 5.1 HDA care connected to a remote speaker.
3. USB webcam with built in mike.

With ALSA trying to get the setup working was a pure mess, dminx, numerous .asoundrc's - and it never really worked right.
With Pulse, especially in recent Fedora releases everything works *out of the box* with zero configuration on my end.
I can move audio from one device to another (In reality - from one speaker set to another).
I can have two active (or actually 3) streams working simultaneously with zero configuration.
... And last and not least, I have a *reliable* method to give different volume levels to different streams.

... Now, YMMV or actually, your millage may be radically different, but keep in mind that for many people latest revisions of Pulse simply work.

You must admit Wine is heavily reliant on good latency, so if your hardware is a setback then running any API's closer to the kernel or hardware, is the better.

Personally I've noticed Wine improvements with sound only with recent releases, older versions were shocking. Maybe this is due to OpenAL.

Back in 1.3.x wine developers decided to continue using ALSA as the main sound layer when the rewrote the mmdevapi layer.
Sadly enough, it never quite worked on PA distributions either due to ALSA bugs or PA bugs (the issue was never really resolved).
In the mean time, there's an external patch that re-enables winepulse.drv [1] and at least in my case, works out of the box and follows the latest upstream release.
As far as I know [2] the wine developers have decided to officially support PA once and for all, but no target release date / version has been set.

I'm not arguing a point, but keep in mind that other people's experience (E.g. me) is *radically* different that yours and in many cases, issues can be solved or triggered by the distribution itself.

Indeed. I have 3 machines I tried to use PulseAudio on. My main PC, with two cards, had certain issues. My tablet PC had huge issues (even system sound didn't play correctly out of the box). But the laptop works with it flawlessly, I never had to change a thing to make it work there. And all of these machines use the same distribution.